Green MP Benjamin Doyle will not
be returning to Parliament this week – following death
threats and accusations of inapropriate language on a
private social media account.
Parliamentary Services
is working with the MP, and the Green Party, around the
received threats, and those are being escalated to police
where necessary.
The Greens are demanding the prime
minister step in over Winston Peters’ statements, saying
there had been an “immense” numbers of death threats against
Green MP Benjamin Doyle.
Peters in a social media post
on Saturday said the media needed to start asking serious
questions about one of Doyle’s social media accounts,
“BibleBeltBussy – what the name really means and the posts –
some of which have apparently been deleted”.
Peters
said there were questions to be asked about Doyle’s use of
“the word Bussy” and “Bussy Galore” and other
content.
“If it were any MP from a government party
the media would’ve already headlined it. The silence from
the Green Party leadership amongst the swirling allegations
and innuendo online is deafening,” Peters wrote.
The
term “bussy” is used by members of rainbow communities and
refers to a man’s anus.
Doyle had posted a series of
messages and images on the private account before they were
an MP, including an image of their child.
Speaking to
reporters at Parliament, Green Party co-leader Chlöe
Swarbrick said the term bussy had been co-opted by rainbow
communities for use “oftentimes with irreverence and
absurdity”.
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“We have a member of parliament that has
been subjected to immense abuse and real-world death threats
which have also incorporated their child and their whānau,”
she said.
As a member of the queer community herself,
she said the “oversimplified way that things are being
represented right now in the twittersphere is just not the
way that we navigate the world with irreverence and
absurdity”.
“[Doyle] used it in a flippant way, in the
way in which many of us would use memes when engaging with
our friends. That’s it,” she said. “You would use it in a
way that you would share a meme with a friend.”
She
said Doyle’s social media account had been private since
before they became an MP.
Asked about the deletions of
some of the posts, Swarbrick said it was a private account,
and “when somebody sees that things on their private account
are being leaked including mis and disinformation relating
to their child, I think it’s pretty normal for somebody to
respond in such a way, to try and shut that down”.
“As
far as I am aware this was Benjamin’s response to feeling
that their child was in immediate danger.”
Co-leader
Marama Davidson said she wanted to address Peters’ comments
and the harm it was causing.
“We are calling on the
prime minister to take responsibility for the behaviour of
his coalition colleague,” she said.
“This isn’t the
standard politicking by the deputy prime minister. This
isn’t a game of who’s winning this round of
clickbait.”
Peters refused to answer questions about
his posts about Doyle in a media conference about specifications
for the new Interislander ferries, but addressed the
matter separately later in the day.
“How could I be
possible spreading disinformation? It’s his post, not mine,”
Peters said.
Doyle uses the pronouns
they/them.
Peters said he was just asking questions,
including of the mainstream media.
“I’m asking of the
mainstream media why don’t you do your job when it comes to
some MPs and spend your time trying to besiege other MPs who
in this case, in my case, were utterly innocent,” he
said.
He said he took no responsibility for the death
threats because “the Green Party came to our office well
after the threats had been given to tell us that this had
been happening”.
“We had already posted by that time
at 9 o’clock in the morning. So for 24 and more hours before
that, that was happening. We are not responsible therefore,
on the chronological grounds that I’ve just given to you,”
he said.
Peters was not concerned his actions may have
added to the problem.
“That was going on long before I
ever said anything, all I did was get the information and
say ‘hang on, this is alarming, I want some answers,” he
said.
Swarbrick said she had sent a text message to
Christopher Luxon on Saturday morning asking to speak with
him about the matter and her concerns about the death
threats. Luxon had passed the message on to National’s chief
of staff, who then had a conversation with the Greens’ chief
of staff about the harm it was leading to.
“I again
have reached out to the prime minister directly via the
phone this morning and have not heard back.”
She said
Doyle would not be present at Parliament this
week.
“There are real-world threats that we are having
to grapple with and we are working with Parliamentary
security on what it looks like to keep them and their child,
their whānau, safe … we will continue to reach across the
aisle and operate in good faith here, I don’t think that it
is in anybody’s interests that this conspiratorial story
continues to get legs.”
Questioned about the matter at
his weekly post-Cabinet media briefing, the prime minister
said he thought Doyle’s use of language in their social
media posts had been “really inappropriate”.
“The
reality of political life, our social media language is
scrutinised by the media, it’s also scrutinised by fellow
politicians and also the public. And ultimately that’s a
case for the Greens’ leadership to deal with,” he
said.
“If that was one of my MPs I think you would
rightfully be scrutinising me about what I’m doing about
that social media language being used, I think those are
questions for the Green Party and the leadership to answer
for.”
He said any threats of violence, death threats
or otherwise, were “totally unacceptable on MPs or frankly
any New Zealander”
Asked if he supported the actions
of Peters – who had acknowledged he already knew of death
threats against Doyle before he posted about the matter on
social media – Luxon said the “only people who should be
accountable for death threats are those that make those
death threats”.
“If there’s an issue there, then the
police need to be very much
involved.”
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